I was excited to have my session on Looking Through the Lens accepted for Northern Voice 2011. I had done this one before, but infused a few more new bits for this audience. More or less, I used photographs to talk about what we can learn about learning from the act of photography:

The mechanics and art of photography unveil an intriguing metaphor for thinking about learning and our world view. For a photographer, the operation of cameras– exploiting apertures, shutter speeds, optics, — coexist with the artistic skills of pre-visualization, framing, composition. It is no longer a field dominated by pros with expensive gear, we can all make photographic art, damnit.

Taking the metaphor farther, creating an engaging learning experience is much more than point and shoot or flipping the settings into automatic mode. Photography is a beautiful example of how you can get better at doing something just by regularly doing (and sharing) your craft. Regular acts of photography, such as the Daily Shoot, are a model of informal learning that works.

All of the stuff below is available (and more links) at http://cogdogblog.com/stuff/nv11/

I have audio I recorded as well
Through the Lens Audio [28.5Mb 39:38]

But the coolest thing that I got, amazing! are these iPad created visual notes from Giulia Forsythe — the full circle as she credits my favorite iPad visual recorder as an inspiration for her to get started (Giulia says she was prompted by both Grant Potter and Dave Cormier to check out Rachel’s work (as should you).

cc licensed ( BY NC SD ) flickr photo shared by giulia.forsythe

It seemed to work really well to use the Twitter Keynote auto tweet to push out links and ideas I was presenting (for the method used, see my Geeking the Keynote notes)– e.g. as I got this great reply from Paul Latrelle with the suggestion to include filters in with my metaphors of aperture, shutter speed, iso

And the audience responded well to the activity where I asked them to take a photo with their mobile camera and post it to my flickr account via email

For many obvious reasons (I hope) this is a presentation I really love doing.

No matter how many titles I created for this post, all of them went the wrong way down innuendo lane.

This morning, at 1:00 AM local time on Brisbane, Australia, I gave an online presentation for the KU Village conference… from bed. I agreed to do this almost 9 months ago, not knowing I was going to be over here- at home it would have been a more humane 8:00 AM slot so I would have managed to be sitting at a desk.

But really, with all the trite sayings of working online and sitting there in your underwear… this is pretty much true. Suit and tie not needed. I can say this is the first presentation I have done from bed, and it is pretty comfortable (thanks to Phil Long for hosting me and providing the podium in his guest room).

And what irony for this conference- I was not the only keynoter presenting from Brisbane- Steve Wheeler is visiting the University of Queensland did his KU Village tale from Brisbane yesterday.

At this conference organized by Kaplan University, in my talk Say it in Photos, I opted to expand a bit more on some ideas about both the power of communicating via photos, but also on the realization that the process of doing a daily photo project is a powerful lesson in informal learning- that there is something you find you want to get better at, you focus attention on doing it on a regular basis, you join a group of others doing the same, you get feedback from that group (sometimes), you give feedback to others in the group (sometimes), but very importantly, you do some amount of reflection on what you’ve done before as part of the improvement process of learning to do something like take better photos.

It also fits nicely with the “it takes 10,000 hours” to get good at something, as popularized by Malcolm Gladwell in his Outliers book. Even if I am spending 2 hours a day doing daily photo activity, its going to take me more than 14 years to reach that mark. That does not send me into a depressing spiral of “I cannot do this”- it just re-iterates to importance of keeping at the practice.

I also took the audience through the fun bits of flickr-y creativity- Five Photo Stories, phrasr, and leading in the end to a live demo of Five Card Flickr Stories. I had the conference organizers send out a call for participants to tag some photos with fiveku, so there would be a special set of stories that could be done for KU Village.

The slides are posted on Slideshare (I plumb forgot to record my own audio, so I have no sound to sync).

I wonder if my next one I can do from a hot tub?

Start the innuendos now….

Jon Breitenbucher invited me back again to do a remote (via Skype) presentation on 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story for the week-long Instructional Technology Faculty Fellows program he and his crew run at the College of Wooster (by the way, they are rocking with wordpress multiuser there).

When I did this last year, it was one of the best sessions I’ve had; a lot because Jon’s team had prepped the faculty, so they already had done some pre-work to pick their story idea. The way we run it is I do the presentation first thing in the morning (wich was really early here on the west coast time!), the faculty spend about 3 hours working with the tools. We then convene after they are done, and they get to talk about what they were able to create (or the problems they had).

This time around, I used Google Presenter for the slides, and we did me on video over Skype to the group in Wooster. I had a slide deck I’d used before for other sessions, and made all the links for URLs as hyperlinks. What did not work well, and I;ve had mixed luck before, was using it in presentation mode, where me clicking the slides advances it for Jon’s computer at the other end. I’ve had it work before, but this time, no matter how many times I would “take control”, when I advanced, the only way to update for them was for me to “take control” again. So we went old school.. me saying “Next slide”

You can see the slides over at http://bit.ly/50ways-wooster and I also have
audio recorded in my Ediro.

I felt bad a few people really struggled with some of the tools- Quite a few of them tried Joggle, one of the tools I rarely look at, someone had issues where Tikatok failed to save their work. It’s hard to tell if it is an isolated experience or if the tool is flaky, and I struggle with how to list that on my tools site (I started addind user reports as Devon has told me of problems with xtimeline).

But you can see the great stuff they did on their twitter-like wordpress site http://faculty-fellows-2010.voices.wooster.edu/ — I am mining their as new examples to add to my 50 Ways site.

And one person had a suggestion which may appear as “Larry’s List”- he asked for which were the 10 top tools; i’ve hesitated to do this because it is a bit subjective, but I think its worthy to share which have the combination of best features and likely reliability.

I have some plans to roll out a new 50Ways wiki (already nabbed the wikispaces spot) to make it open for more people to contribute. The current 50 Web 2.0 Ways to Tell a Story wiki is set for me only to edit, since I used it a lot for presentations; I had it open to members for a bit, but someone indvertantly wiped out some chunks.

But I have these ideas for a new more open wiki, and am widely open to suggestions:

• All of the existing materials will be moved over there
• Put each tool on its own page, have a screen shot, a more detailed description, a list of pros and cons, tags to identify both the type of tools (Slideshow, Map) as well as the types of media supported)
• The tags could be used to list all associated tools, so you can more easily get to the ones that allow you to import audio, or ones that use video, or ones that are presentation tools
• When people contribute, I will have them use the wikispaces code to add their “signature” to the page as a contributor
• Tool pages would be open to edit, so people can add more examples, or modify the description. I really want to have more, and better relevant educational examples.
• I’ll keep the main list under lock, so as people create new tool pages, I will add them once they have all the “parts”; I’ll provide a template for the tool page

I had dreamed of having this ready for this week’s preso, but stuff just keeps getting in the way!

Talkin’ Bout Open from cogdog on Vimeo.

I could not help selecting the D’Arcy Norman Bigger Than Life glare for the freeze frame!

These quotes from colleagues near and far were taken from the 34 longer interviews I collected for Amazing Stories of Openness, and the full stories will be made available after the presentation next Wednesday.

I got the videos in a variety of ways; in person with my Flip Mino (the best quality); Skype video interviews (doh, guess who did not mute his mic and ended up sounding like a wheezing phone pranker), response videos to my YouTube Call for Stories video, ones people just sent me, audio recordings I set to images, even from my little Canon pocket camera at a dark bar in Hawaii with subjects lit by LED flashlight.

I actually did all the edits in a 2 version back copy of iMovie HD (the one before the really bad version)– I have a pretty good technique for lifting out video so I can insert voice overs of screens (and hopefully not too much Kens Burn nausea).

It’s gonna be a fun show! I’ve got a few surprises up my dog collar. I am sure you are not going to miss Open Ed, eh? Go buy a plane ticket and register, willya?

I’ve gotten a good collection of Amazing Stories of Openness so far for my August presentation at the Open Ed Conference.

But you know what?

I want more.

I’ve got a bunch of messages, sweet tweets about what a great idea it is, or “I’ll work on it”, but folks, c’mon, this is not all that hard? I’ve outlined examples. I made a comic version. I’ve put a call to respond on YouTube.

What is so hard? Is it worrying about being “not Amazing” enough?

All I need is a small story of how a time when you shared something online, a blog post, some media, that someone used it, connected with you, got you a visit or a job just as an unexpected outcome of sharing on the Open Web.

I’ve been video recording people in Skype or with my Flip, but really, all you need to do is send my a little background info via my Google Form and send my an audio and/or video file with a 2-5 minute (or whatever length) recording of you telling a story.

And you know what? All you folks coming to Open Ed who just talked about sharing a story? I dare ya to come to my session. I call into question your Openness! I dare ya! I double dare ya!

cc licensed flickr photo shared by kevinclark

That’s the last I will badger you. Pfffffffffft.

I recently felt like this wistful gal during a recent online seminar- isolated, lonely, and wishing to go outside and play. With nose-diving budgets and more work moving online, it’s time to raise the bar on how we run online events.

Like a horrendously designed PowerPoint, no one sets out with a plan of creating a deadly dull online seminar, but they seem to happen often enough. Frankly, since the first kinds I recall seeing in the late 1990s, even with new software, little seems to change and the form feels as tired as a lecture on fungi:

• Speakers talking non stop over long series of slides; which geometrically and via audio dominate the environment,
• Audience participants are marginalized to passively listening or ignoring the content while they fritter away on a small text chat area. Or they leave themselves logged in while they go outside to wash their car or check the weather.

I am not writing this like I have all the answers or to ridicule the efforts of others, but I have organized more than a few of these, and wish to share just my ideas based on that experience. There are guaranteed more ideas out there or more people that know more than me.

The session I attended was hosted in GoToMeeting (or technically GoToWebinar) which has been around a long time; I’ve only used it before to do a small conference meeting with a vendor showing me a product. And it is very likely the limitations I saw were more an issue of the convener struggling with the meeting options, but the result was not very conducive

So if you want to run a really deadly online seminar, and don;t know how to do that, here are some pointers.

• Make it hard to even get inside. Maybe it was vestigal issues with my now upgraded Firefox 3.0, but every link I tried to access the meeting for both a preview and the day off, failed to load the java client, and kept bopping me to a FAQ page where there was a link to “join meeting”, resulting in an endless circle. I got in fine in Safari.

  
  cc licensed flickr photo shared by documentarist

  Technically I understand why there is a big handoff for these Java based apps, but in Elluminate I hate ending up littering my desktop with meeting.jnlp files and no matter how many times I tell Elluminate I trust them, I have to click through a dialog box.

  This is minor, but it puts a speed bump into my experience.

• Don’t let your participants know who else is there. This meeting I was in there was a box to list participants, but all it had as a number at the top .Talk about isolation, not being able to see who else was in the shared space was so isolating. Does anyone get what the “social” part of social software is about? People, relationships, proximity.
• Make it hard or impossible for the audience to communicate with each other. This seminar was set up with a common set of tools I see also in Connect. Rather than having an open chat area for free flowing conversation, it has a question box- participants can enter questions but no other participants can see them, instead, they are queued to a moderator who is supposed to respond in an orderly fashion. It is audience filtering.

  This may seem logical in some sort of flow chart instructional design world of arrows and boxes, but is a killer for the audience experience, and layers even more isolation on the experience,

  I never use these tools in my seminars. I leave an open chat because my audience are adults who can engage in conversations, answer questions, etc, without some hall monitor filtering their voices.

• Don’t greet the audience or make them feel welcome. I got into this session 15 minutes before it started, and there was no chat message, no welcome screen (the presenters were flipping slides), and on one greeted or welcomed the audience. In fact, all I could hear on the audio was someone keyboarding, probably IM-ing or tweeting. Another layer of isolation for this deadly seminar cake.

  This is so easily managed, do I really have to spell it out?

  For our online events, I try to be the first one in the room. As people arrive, I greet them in text or voice, if I know them I can see something in reference to what I know, if not I can extend a welcome message. Also (and I stole this idea from EDUCAUSE) because often people cannot tell if their audio works, I play a track of audio as background music- I play from a 30 minute collection of music from open content sources.

  
  cc licensed flickr photo shared by Dain Sandoval

  What you want to avoid is the enemy of radio- dead air.

  Once there is a group of people, I may ask them to respond in chat to a simple question like, “introduce yourself and let us know where you are from?” or “How about letting us know what you see from where you are sitting now.” or “I just finished lunch and had a turkey sandwich- what is in your lunch plans?”

  I learned so much about this from Johnathan Finkelstein’s Learning in Real Time (book and web site), especially a portion that compared running an online event to hosting a dinner party. In his work I have seen at LearningTimes, Jonathan is not only a virtuoso in hosting, he is an expert at using the technology well to have people be actively engaged.

  Get the book now if you do real time events. And want them to be of the non deadly variety.

• Ignore your audience, make ‘em wait til you fill the hour with your voice, do not involve them at all. Most online sessions are so focused on moving through a slide deck, they marginalize people to some 3 minute Q&A after the allotted time has ended. If you want an audience, interact with them. break up the presentation. Create an activity. Let someone from the audience lead the show. Use a game, a tool, a survey, a whiteboard.

I am sure there are more ways to be deadly, but I hope you see my point.

Just like classroom lectures, there are a minority of people that can be enaging, interesting, in an online monologue mode, but most of us are not. An online seminar is a different venue than an in person audience, and we ought to be taking advantage of what the environments provide, not shoe horning old presentation modes into new boxes.

Frankly the slide flipping presentations with marginalized audiences just about bore me from the start.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by NMC Second Life

As much as people can scoff or say “harrumph” at Second Life, over at NMC we have been running our online conferences in a virtual world space for almost 2 years, and can see categorically (and have feedback collected) that the amount of social engagement feels an order of magnitude higher because, even with the cheesy graphics, there is a real social presence that happens there, In a web based seminar, as soon as a session ends (or before) people peel off and log off– at our virtual world events, people linger, share, converse between the sessions. They engage in informal session just be virtue of being social.

The amount of social interaction in a narrow marigin chat window on the side of slides is extremely limited.

We can do better.

Unless… you really want to be deadly, then you have at least my 5 tips.

cc licensed flickr photo shared by jamelah

Bonus Update! Five ways not enough? A new one is to sign up people who log into your seminar to an email list! People love getting unsolicited sales materials!

it seems so web 2.0ish.

I’m having problems with what looks like fine MPEG 4 video on my computer upload to YouTube and end up with the voice and video way out of sync, like the badly dubbed Godzilla movies, so here it is hoisted on my own server.

It’s still a call for responses, so please reply to the bad synced version on YouTube or post a comment here with a link to your video response. And I have to admit, I need some diversity- so far (self included) my cast mostly all white guys. C’mon ladies and folks from outside the US? But I am not picky, white guys are still welcome.

call for amazing stories (quicktime)

In my first cut of shotting the video, I used the laptop camera on my MacBookPro and spoke audio into my headset mike. The audio was pretty shabby, and started out out of sync.

So I redid my monologue, using my Flip Mino sitting on a GorillaPod. With no one at home, it was a bit of trial and error (out-takes not) to get the shot aimed right. I edited it quickly in iMovie (I am still using the 2 versions back one). I add titles, and I like to separate the audio track to I can cut and drop in some still images. I also went to ccMIxter for some background music- Happyhappyrainbows by colab.

I save mine as broadband high quality MPEG-4, which comes in at 640×480. I uploaded to YouTube, and the web version was way out of sync. I redid it at medium quality and same result. I don’t understand what YouTube is doing in the processing, but it is borked. I give up.

Sometimes, you just have to say, it ain;t gonna work, and move on.

You can also send me some details on your story via the Google Form at the bottom of http://cogdog.wikispaces.com/AmazingStories. I am really excited about the bits I got so far, and I have a fun reto idea for the presentation in Vancouver.

I hear from folks who want easier ways to run presos in CoolIris (if you missed that boat, get the cool Firefox add on)- and there are more options now, including running it from a set of photos on your desktop, and likely the easiest, IMHO, is to create a flickr set and view that in CoolIris.

A recent tweak I found, which adds zero to the presentation itself, but I could not resist, is the new ability to add your own custom logo to the CoolIris menu bar:

This is just a PNG file (useful because you can use PNG transparency to avoid Logo in a Box) I have stored in an images directory on the root level of my web site– it’s just another line in your media.rss file right after the first tag. The image should be no higher than 26 pixels so it fits in the bar

<channel>
<atom:icon>/images/cogdog-piclens.png</atom:icon>

You typically would be using a full URL, but this is because of another presentation “trick” I do with CoolIris- I do not run the presentation from the web (oh the joys of conference hotel internet) but from a web server running locally on my laptop- so my desktop URL is http://www.cogdogblog.loc/…. and I use relative links to keep everything in tact.

So it’s not really crucial, but just a Neat Thing to Do.

A current frustration with CoolIris is that either the newer version of it or Flash v10 has broken the ability to play FLV videos inside CoolIris- I can view videos fine from YouTube, but nothing works as it did a month ago for my own spun shows. Dean Shareski did send a link from the developers site acknowledging this (and that link is now gone), the developer forums have others asking about this, I even got a tweet response from CoolIris where they acted surprised– but the point is the method that worked in May 2009 to embed FLV inside custom mediaRSS now fails.

One approach would be to uninstall flash 10 and roll back to 9. What a PITA. For now, I am just changing my strategy, and not putting the FLVs in my mediaRSS file, but building an image representational screen, and using the link option to jump out to my own web page that has the video embedded. Not as elegant but you do what you can….

So as a sneak preview, it was just a few days ago that I realized I had missed a major cultural reference that fit in well for my presentation in Hawaii:

50 Ways Hawaiian Style

The real reason I like using CoolIris, beyond the “wow” effect, is that ability to jump out to URLs in the middle of a preso (simply by assigning the URL in the ... tag) and to easily jump back to where you were before. I may adjust this in the live presentation, because there is a wait period while the URL loads in a new tab- for just my presentation version, I plan to pre-load all my externals in tabs, and just jump out of CoolIris to go right to the site. It can be awkward standing on stage waiting for the site to load.

Book ‘em Domin-O!

Many will regret (or will lie and say they were there) missing last night’s presentation performance by Jim Groom and Tom Woodard as the norm-blowing closing act for the 2008 NMC Rock the Academy Symposium. You have to wade through this blog post to get to the video recording ;-)

Donning their gas masks, flame throwers, and edupunk t-shirts, Jim and Tom laid out the warnings of zombies and where they lurk in educational technology. The audience was warned before hand that this was going to be an intense, almost radioactive presentation, so we provided them safety glasses ahead of time.

They started asking the audience what their fears were.

[16:33]  Redbaiters Stanwell: What are scared of?
[16:33]  CDB Barkley: getting sued
[16:33]  Elli Pinion: lack of money
[16:33]  Oggie Ballinger: Budget cuts
[16:33]  Corwin Carillon: accountability
[16:33]  CDB Barkley: losing students
[16:33]  Mae Mathilde: lack of control
[16:33]  Rane Mistwallow: security
[16:33]  Hyperion Sands: privacy
[16:33]  Ginger Questi: change in almost any form
[16:33]  Hyperion Sands: IP
[16:33]  Bron Bloxome: IP -retention rates - globalisation
[16:33]  Sarracenia Lupindo: too many students
[16:34]  Ninmah Ash: technology
[16:34]  Eliana Jigsaw: parents complaining
[16:34]  Rane Mistwallow: educational technology
[16:34]  Caspar Lefevre: chipmunks
[16:34]  Ninmah Ash: tornadoes

Jim and Tom then launched some opening strongly worded (and pictorial) warnings about zombies and where they lurk. And then when Jim yelled “Look all around you!” pandemonium broke out- the sky went dark, the corporate placards revealed their true hidden messages, and several zombies revealed themselves from their clever “normal person” disguises. Jim and Tom managed to thwart them off (for now) with their flame guns.

And then they went on to describe how to counter-act the zombies, that there is a solution…. becoming an Ed Tech Survivalist:

and learn the techniques of troutlining for information as taught from the Alabama swamps by Fishing with Tom (“the internet is just like a big swamp”):

Now this was just the fun part. Tom and Jim went on to succinctly describing the ideas of syndication, aggregating, tagging, re-organizing content using free, open source tools that liberate your organization from the zombie grip. Now while I’ve been tuned into their work for a while, I could tell for the audience the power shown in the UMWblogs examples and site wide feed tagging were really revolutionary.

You can get more of their resources, including the preso slides, from their conference session description on the NMC web site.

This was just stellar, and I cannot gush enough about the message these guys from Virginia blasted into Second Life. Don’t take my word for it, check it out yourself:

I am headed out the door ASAP for a weeklong roadtrip and am thus avoiding watching and counting my ums.